


He Used To "Smile"

by bexacaust



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23727790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bexacaust/pseuds/bexacaust
Summary: Ask me if I’m happy one more timeI’ll give you a reply if you give me your eye
Kudos: 15





	He Used To "Smile"

**Author's Note:**

> [Inspired by work by eagleart on Tumblr]

t was whispered in a miasma alongside and around him as he walked through the hallways of the ship- with his flat expression and dead optics and involuntarily twitching trigger finger.

_‘He **used** to smile.’_

It’s murmured gently, in pity and in pain, by those who remembered him bright and free and wild-growing like kudzu vine and wild daffodil.

_‘The Least **Warlike** Autobot’._

It’s mocked by suicide-soldiers; mechs who faced dead and ‘faced Death and fell in love with ticking time bombs and all things impermanent. His mouth quirks as he ponders, one evening as he’s finally and truly alone, that he became so much the same and yet…

_‘He used to **smile?** ’_

He ignores the sympathy wafting over him as the TIC stares forlornly. He ignores the bitterness in waves standing next to his equal in a cold laboratory (but never as cold as him, he knows, from what others have spat in his face after too much liquor makes them something close to brave). He ignores the regret washing in on weak tides as he nods to the CMO in a meeting as dry as sunbaked graveyard dirt- a wry mulch of dead dreams and dead-er deities.

He used to smile, once upon a time- When the world and the creation were both whole and hopeful and when the deepset scars on his protoform didn’t sting and twinge with the slightest twitch of optics or facial plating-

A reminder.

Happiness is impermanent. Happiness is a fool’s variable, unable or unwilling to be reproduced regardless of experiment; and oh, has he experimented.

Kisses and killshots begin to taste the same after faces lose their meaning; when the world decided he was the metric to compare merciless revenges side by side then everything became a single solitary style of feedback.

Gunshot residue and communion wine taste exactly the same once Gods and Comrades abandon you.

_‘ **He** used to smile?’_

_“I **used** to.”_, he finally answers one night, leaning close to a once smug face, _“Sometimes I **still** do- but there’s a **price.** ”_

A brief glimpse of a murderer’s mania as he taps his reticule…

_**But he doesn’t smile.** _

* * *


End file.
